1. Collect headlines about bomb threats to libraries, because we’re choosing a timeline where libraries receive bomb threats because one time a queer wrote a book and didn’t die at the end. And also librarians are witches.
[these should be read from paper held in a shaking hand, while standing on something that will elevate you three and one half inches above the ground or to the height you believe you are–whichever comes last.]
2. My mother is holding me 28 years ago (which means as of this writing I am now as old as she was then) while I mourn. Or she’s not holding me a decade ago while we walk on the beach. Or she tells me she looks up to me and I feel like I’m falling away. Now her hands hurt too much to hold a pen. And I still need to be held like that while the world crumbles, but I suppose it’s my turn to square my shoulders.
[raise your voice and try to speak each word with equal weight, the emotion is the words, they do not need more, feel free to stop and swallow the gall when needed, if clothing must be rent, do it between lost poems]
3. Contrapuntal. A surreal pas de deux. The reports break apart like bombs, the shrapnel of it all embedded in whispered conversations, in bodies and lives. She has exit strategies and he doesn’t know if his children will be safe, and she doesn’t know if she’ll lose hers, and they have an X on the passport–once treasure and now target. And I have nothing to say, I cannot be reassuring.
[for added gravitas, speak this at noon in a town square while holding a lit lantern–but!–under no circumstances reference the Death of God, Zarathustra cannot save us from ourselves]
4. The ghost of Tituba boards a plane in March, 2025. The strange echoes and mirrored symmetry of our American History of enslaving and our American Present of ensnaring. Stolen to and stolen away. And the flight attendants were instructed to not look the kidnapped in the eye, but were not instructed how to evacuate the shackled in the event of a water landing. Look out of the window with Tituba. Look into the ocean as a grave. We are returning to our roots buried in poisoned ground.
[at this point, you may be flagging, the weight of so much misplaced poetic energy pressing against nerves, inflaming lymph nodes, dulling the roses in your cheeks and the starshine in your eyes, press on, press on.]
5. Self-immolation. I wake up, and put on my clothes, and go to work, and buy my groceries and cook my dinner, and sleep my sleep and dream my little dreams all while living in a speed run toward fascism compressed into 100 days and we all said to each other–I knew it would get this bad, but I didn’t think it would be this bad this fast, and really what can a person do, no one will listen, no one has power–. There is no breaking this cycle. There is no learning from history. I start to understand the purpose of burning. Why one might pour kerosene over the marked body in sunlight on courthouse steps, settle comfortably within the fumes, give some warning before striking that match. To burn screaming in anger and pain. To burn and burn and burn and burn, leaving scorch marks on concrete and greasy ashes. How else to bleed the distance between good and evil, how else to pin the mind to the world. And I had said this all and I had heard it echoed.
[we are raw like oysters, like clams, maybe you are panting now or bored, knees locked, and paper damp and sweaty in your hand, you are staring at a horizon that is rushing away from you]